A Photon's tale

[Kuba Powiertowski]

I thought about this post for a long time. And I came to the conclusion that whatever I wrote, it would always be too little, not entirely clear, and maybe it would be best if this text would inspire you to… well, Looking

But from the beginning. I have been attracted to physics and mathematics since I was a child, and although I literally do not deal with any of these fields professionally, I still love them. Especially that the last, over 100 years, has been the discovery by outstanding practitioners of these sciences of laws and truths of nature, the implications of which most of us, including academia, do not see, do not want to see, do not understand, do not want to understand or do not accept.
The problem is both in our nature and in the education system, which has its roots in it and at the same time strengthens it. Such a strange loop.
Quite simply, Newtonian physics with its Enlightenment determinism is taken as the basis for teaching physics in primary and secondary schools. The same is true of biology, where equally deterministic Darwinism reigns supreme.
But as we know it is already passe.
The last 100 years of physics, mathematics, and recently also biology (sic!) have been discovering laws and truths that less and less often fit into the description of the reality we like so much, fully reducible, predictable, over which we will one day achieve complete control.
General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the last Big Bell Test blew up irretrievably our dreams of power.

So to the point.
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by light. When I was little, at night, when I was camping, I was sending the light from my flashlight into the sky, towards some star and I asked my dad when it would get there. The mere awareness that, while observing the night sky, I am looking at the past of the stars and a different past, different in time, amazed me and amazed me to this day. There the Past and here the Now.
When studying the General Theory of Relativity, one gets the impression of the striking scale of this relativity.
The relativity of time, the relativity of space.
For time to exist, it is necessary to project energy into the lower energy states as matter having mass. Each particle with a mass is a kind of watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave_clock).
The only "particle" without a rest mass is a photon. The photon, of course, is a very imaginary particle. It is actually the smallest possible quantum of energy. Paradoxically, string physicists to be able to physically examine a string (if it actually exists) that is 10ˉ³³m in size, the so-called Planck size, would have to generate energy in accelerators close to the Planck energy of 10¹ꝰ GeV, ie close to the energy of the Big Bang.
Meanwhile, there is no point in talking about the size of the photon. It is a dimensionless, massless point, energy in its purest form. Yet, it's here:)
Light and its medium played a leading role in Einstein's idea from the very beginning. It was just thinking about the motion of the light wave that young Albert had found a trail leading him to open a new chapter in physics. I am interested in the perspective of the photon itself. Imagine that we are not dealing with a simple, soulless particle, but with a being that can share its impressions with the world. What will a being, chasing at speed c, see and measure?
At this point, you need to refresh yourself on two basic concepts related to the special theory of relativity. The first is time dilation. It means that two observers moving in relation to each other will feel the passage of time differently. The proton accelerated in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider "ages" much slower than the physicists watching it. This phenomenon has an important practical aspect. Many elementary particles normally decay after a millionth of a second: due to time dilation, from our perspective, their lifespan is extended many times.
The second keyword is a contraction, i.e. shortening the distance. The summoned proton will perceive the accelerator path as much shorter than the scientist standing next to it. Although designers can cut off both hands, the device is 27 kilometers long, for an object approaching the speed of light it will become shorter and shorter.

Now that we know how relative the concepts of time and space turn out to be, let's go back to the photon. It's a bit counterintuitive, but between the 99.99999…% c that massive particles achieve in accelerators and the full speed of light available to a photon, there's a colossal difference. If we put a watch on a proton from the accelerator and watched its indications, we would see the effect of dilatation - the hands would move slower than on the clock on the wall. The closer to c, the greater the difference in measurement. However, a proton has mass, so there is no force in the world that can accelerate it to the speed of light.

So what would a time from an analogous watch "worn" by a photon look like? This is probably not a particularly demanding conundrum. At 100% the speed of light, time… stops. Logic suggests that since approaching 300,000 km / s causes the clocks to slow down, reaching the limit will slow it down completely. In the eyes of an outside observer, the photon remains an object frozen in time. The second hand of his imaginary watch would not even twitch.
As for contraction, we come to a no less fascinating conclusion. Since acceleration shortens the space accordingly, then reaching the full speed of light should reduce the distance traveled to ... zero. When you turn on the flashlight and aim at the opposite wall standing 5 meters from you, it does not cover any distance from the point of view of the light beam. Let's not be so modest! Even a photon emitted by a quasar 10 billion light-years away sees this monstrous distance as non-existent. From its point of view, the journey to Earth would not take even a second. If the massless particle could tell us the story of its traveler, we would probably not hear anything special. In any case, we would have a hard time understanding its relationship. The beam of light perceives all available space as compressed to zero. The moment of take-off de facto coincides with the moment of reaching the destination.
Time does not exist for a photon, so it travels instantly between any points. At the same time, space remains infinitely contracted for it. Both points "lie" on each other, so the journey may not take time anyway. Contraction and time dilation merge into a relativistic whole.
Now think of the primordial photon born in the first gamma-ray burst, right after the big bang. Amazing as it is, from our perspective it hasn't aged a second. In turn for him, the entire history of the universe seems to be accumulated at one point. Nothing has ever happened and all that was, is, and will be, happening NOW.
And now for the best. I'm sitting in the car park. I still have half an hour to meet the client. I look at the play of light, shade, and colors of the city houses and trees surrounding me. I think about the physics of the surrounding reality.
The last Big Bell Test confirmed HIGHLY that for so-called local realism to exist, conscious observation, a conscious act of creating this realism, is necessary. As one of the main researchers, Carlos Abellán of ICFO explains: "Thanks to extraordinary machines, physical systems built to test the laws of physics, we know that there are gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. But the question about local realism cannot be answered with the help of a machine. That we ourselves must be part of the experiment for the universe to remain. " Scientifically, we also slowly come to what mystics discovered thousands of years ago. It's just a roundabout and with great hesitation, I think to myself.
And suddenly a flash. This eternal photon, from the perspective of which I do not exist, is absorbed by the receptors in my eye, it reaches the visual cortex of my avatar, which creates a unique probabilistic version of my reality. My Dream. I sit in the car and look at It. My Dream. It pushes me into the car seat. When I get home, I open Word editor on my computer and start writing my memories in the present continuous tense. The past comes alive. I keep writing over the next few days and thus reach very small details of my distant past. The story continues. It never started. Everything happens NOW. It is a story of Consciousness written with a Photon.

[Kuba Powiertowski]

As always, I have to add something else.
This insight is available to anyone at any time. With a little reflection and understanding of what's going on here, you'll understand that every time You look you are looking at Your Dream

REALLY

[Kuba Powiertowski]

And I'll probably be blind in the next life. To learn humility. I apologize to anyone with physical blindness.